Nocturnal History of Architecture: Column Issue 2

How night has shaped architectural planning throughout history

For centuries, architectural theory, discourse and agency have been based on diurnal and solar paradigms. References to night in Vitruvius’s De architectura are few, and the same absence is notable in Renaissance treatises by Alberti or Palladio. It was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that the invention and institutionalization of artificial light in private and public spaces gradually transformed conceptions of night in the architectural discipline.
This volume offers the first attempt at a nocturnal history of architecture. What emerges from the studies is the thesis that the identity of human beings―across time and their domestic, professional and cultural spaces―is powerfully determined by the parameters of nighttime. By analyzing and studying “night scenes,” this book reveals how the night is a laboratory for the development of new forms of conceptualizing space and, ultimately, of living.